[Journey] - Building A $5,000/mo Web Design Studio From Scratch

Montoya

Montoya

Junior Member
Joined
Dec 19, 2018
Messages
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My Introduction:

Hello World,

My name is… Montoya and I am from a small Baltic country.
I was in web development for a while and this year I decided to open my own web design studio. So, my Goal is to Build A $5,000/mo Web Design Studio From Scratch.

Primarily, I created this journey to keep myself motivated and get help from fellow BHW members to reach my Goal. But hopefully it can also serve as a motivation for some of you.
At the moment I am not getting any orders. For a start, I decided to focus on Wordpress development with Divi as I know this web builder quite well. I have a small portfolio of previous projects, it should be good for a start.
So, I'll be doing my weekly updates there from now on. If anyone has any helpful tips, please share!

Let's see where this journey will take me/us.

THE Plan:

As I said, for now I want to focus on building websites with Wordpress Divi editor. As I want to offer my services locally in my country and globally, I’m going to try different lead generation and outreach channels. Then I'll stick with what works the best. It might be that what perfectly works locally, doesn't work in other places of the globe and vice versa. So, my initial plan is (not necessarily in that order):

  • Focus on building websites with Divi.
  • Build a Studio local website - the goal is to have some local leads from organic traffic. Also I want to focus on SEO as early as possible. I will do it only for my local website as I realise the level of competition in the global market.
  • Build a Studio global website (EN version) - mainly for my portfolio showcase and maybe some leads.
  • Cold emails - will choose a specific niche and target businesses that don’t have a website with personalized offers.
  • Outreach to other studios or freelancers and offer them my services.
  • Build social media presence (Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram) for social outreaching and later focus on what works the best.
  • Try other lead generation channels (marketplaces, Fiverr, Upwork, forums, paid leads).
  • Later on I am planning to start offering maintenance and hosting services for customers.

This Week's Plan:

  • Go live width Studio local website. It may not be perfect, but it must be. Will improve it later.
  • Choose a niche, scrape the email list and prepare the offer for the first cold email campaign. Will use it as a template for letter campaigns.

Money:
Expenses: $0
Revenue: $0
 
Last edited:
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Good luck with your journey, it has potential to reach your final goal
 
If you stick with it and deliver premium quality works you can reach your goal. Congratulations on your journey
 
Weekly update

Hello world,

Studio website:
Studio website is on. The initial plan was to build just ‘some’ website and improve it later. But I changed the plan and decided to do it right from the beginning. I put in some work and now I have ‘the’ website with some branding, keyword analysis, nice custom design, portfolio and high quality content for the home page and main service page. Of course, I need pages for secondary keywords, so I will try to make a few new pages every week.
According to my keyword analysis, there are about 20K google searches in my country for this niche. And about 5K of them are from the keywords with commercial intent or very close to it. So, I think with some seo efforts I could have my own lead generation channel... Right? Maybe other studio owners could tell, how many leads they get directly from their websites?
Hm, also the funny thing is… when I was collecting my work samples for a portfolio, I realized that most of the suitable work I could show was for the local market. I have some works in English, but I think they are too few. Will have to figure out how to add more works to my global portfolio later.

Cold email campaign:
The plan was to scrape the email list and prepare an offer. Didn't do that, because of the focus on the studio website. Just made a little Scrapy web scraper for scraping two main business directories in my country by selected category. It seems to work. So, my plan for a cold email campaign is moving to next week.

If anyone has any tips, please share !

This Week's Plan:
  • Work on studio website: internal and technical seo, add few new pages with quality content.
  • Scrape the email list and begin the first cold email campaign.
  • Open social profiles (Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram). For now, nothing fancy, just nice looking profiles with ‘hello world’ messages.
 
Montoya said:
My Introduction:

Hello World,

My name is… Montoya and I am from a small Baltic country.
I was in web development for a while and this year I decided to open my own web design studio. So, my Goal is to Build A $5,000/mo Web Design Studio From Scratch.

Primarily, I created this journey to keep myself motivated and get help from fellow BHW members to reach my Goal. But hopefully it can also serve as a motivation for some of you.
At the moment I am not getting any orders. For a start, I decided to focus on Wordpress development with Divi as I know this web builder quite well. I have a small portfolio of previous projects, it should be good for a start.
So, I'll be doing my weekly updates there from now on. If anyone has any helpful tips, please share!

Let's see where this journey will take me/us.

THE Plan:

As I said, for now I want to focus on building websites with Wordpress Divi editor. As I want to offer my services locally in my country and globally, I’m going to try different lead generation and outreach channels. Then I'll stick with what works the best. It might be that what perfectly works locally, doesn't work in other places of the globe and vice versa. So, my initial plan is (not necessarily in that order):

  • Focus on building websites with Divi.
  • Build a Studio local website - the goal is to have some local leads from organic traffic. Also I want to focus on SEO as early as possible. I will do it only for my local website as I realise the level of competition in the global market.
  • Build a Studio global website (EN version) - mainly for my portfolio showcase and maybe some leads.
  • Cold emails - will choose a specific niche and target businesses that don’t have a website with personalized offers.
  • Outreach to other studios or freelancers and offer them my services.
  • Build social media presence (Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram) for social outreaching and later focus on what works the best.
  • Try other lead generation channels (marketplaces, Fiverr, Upwork, forums, paid leads).
  • Later on I am planning to start offering maintenance and hosting services for customers.

This Week's Plan:

  • Go live width Studio local website. It may not be perfect, but it must be. Will improve it later.
  • Choose a niche, scrape the email list and prepare the offer for the first cold email campaign. Will use it as a template for letter campaigns.

Money:
Expenses: $0
Revenue: $0
Click to expand...

Love the confidence! Will look forward to this journey! By the way, where I can check your past work?
 
JohnCorsetti said:
Love the confidence! Will look forward to this journey! By the way, where I can check your past work?
Click to expand...

By_ReFLeX said:
I want to learn python these days. good luck
Click to expand...

Thank you guys for your support.
I will definitely share my works with you when I finish my global portfolio. Now I am focused on local part of my studio.
 
Montoya said:
My Introduction:

Hello World,

My name is… Montoya and I am from a small Baltic country.
I was in web development for a while and this year I decided to open my own web design studio. So, my Goal is to Build A $5,000/mo Web Design Studio From Scratch.

Primarily, I created this journey to keep myself motivated and get help from fellow BHW members to reach my Goal. But hopefully it can also serve as a motivation for some of you.
At the moment I am not getting any orders. For a start, I decided to focus on Wordpress development with Divi as I know this web builder quite well. I have a small portfolio of previous projects, it should be good for a start.
So, I'll be doing my weekly updates there from now on. If anyone has any helpful tips, please share!

Let's see where this journey will take me/us.

THE Plan:

As I said, for now I want to focus on building websites with Wordpress Divi editor. As I want to offer my services locally in my country and globally, I’m going to try different lead generation and outreach channels. Then I'll stick with what works the best. It might be that what perfectly works locally, doesn't work in other places of the globe and vice versa. So, my initial plan is (not necessarily in that order):

  • Focus on building websites with Divi.
  • Build a Studio local website - the goal is to have some local leads from organic traffic. Also I want to focus on SEO as early as possible. I will do it only for my local website as I realise the level of competition in the global market.
  • Build a Studio global website (EN version) - mainly for my portfolio showcase and maybe some leads.
  • Cold emails - will choose a specific niche and target businesses that don’t have a website with personalized offers.
  • Outreach to other studios or freelancers and offer them my services.
  • Build social media presence (Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram) for social outreaching and later focus on what works the best.
  • Try other lead generation channels (marketplaces, Fiverr, Upwork, forums, paid leads).
  • Later on I am planning to start offering maintenance and hosting services for customers.

This Week's Plan:

  • Go live width Studio local website. It may not be perfect, but it must be. Will improve it later.
  • Choose a niche, scrape the email list and prepare the offer for the first cold email campaign. Will use it as a template for letter campaigns.

Money:
Expenses: $0
Revenue: $0
Click to expand...
I like Web Design, I like your week plan.

I'm following your thread and I wish luck.
 
nakamura said:
Update:

They finally approved the update. Man, this was nasty. I spent 3 weeks guessing whats wrong with my app and app store description.

The problem is: The rejection is really vague. They say:



And this can many a lot of things. It just leaves you guessing. Is the UI the problem? The binary code? one specific feature? The app title?

I improved my entire app, changed its design, changed its branding, added new features, onboarding, paywall, etc. but NONE of that was ever the problem. According to them, the screenshots were the problem. Specifically, as they write: "metadata". The metadata includes the title, keywords, app description, subtitle and the screenshots.

After every rejection I asked them: Whats the exact problem? can you be a bit more specific? but they just kept copy and pasting the same reason above until I requested a call with them.

I mean, it is also in their interest to fix this problem as soon as possible. I believe they have a lot of things to do, many apps to review. I don't know why they wouldn't just say the exact reason. I mean, lets be honest, the guys are looking at something specific and say "Nope, he didn't change it - rejection". Sometimes the app review took 15 minutes until they rejected it. So they were definitely looking at ONE specific thing they wanted me to change, I just had no idea what it was.
Click to expand...
just posted in wrong thread still following :)
 
One recommendation, include Youtube into your social media presence. Even if you don't do anything with it in the present time. Just watch videos with it in your free time or something IDK. You may want to branch out into it in the future.

It's a good thing to ''warm up'' an account, because older accounts are treated better by the Youtube Algo. So when you do post something you won't get treated like a suspect bot by Youtube and you'll get a lot of audience fast.

Good lucks Montoya
 
fielddigger said:
One recommendation, include Youtube into your social media presence. Even if you don't do anything with it in the present time. Just watch videos with it in your free time or something IDK. You may want to branch out into it in the future.

It's a good thing to ''warm up'' an account, because older accounts are treated better by the Youtube Algo. So when you do post something you won't get treated like a suspect bot by Youtube and you'll get a lot of audience fast.

Good lucks Montoya
Click to expand...

Nice tip man, thank you. At the moment I am working on my social profiles. Will include youtube as well.
 
Weekly update

Hello world,

Studio website:
A little slowly but surely. Added two new service pages with quality content, faq and stuff. Worked on websites inner seo and schema. Mobile page speed is so so, but at the moment I will focus on adding new pages. Will optimize website speed when all the main pages are ready. Google already indexed all the pages. No rankings yet, but I am not expecting any movement until the end of next month.

Cold email campaign:
The plan has changed. I selected a few industries from the local business directory and scraped the info. I got two spreadsheets. One with businesses without a listed website and the other, with businesses with websites. I checked if the businesses without websites are still active and filter them. Then I checked businesses with websites. I filtered nice looking websites, websites that are done by some marketing companies and some other criterias. Then I looked again at the remaining websites and noted what problems they have. I should say it’s quite a time consuming job and it took me all day just to check and filter all businesses according to my criteria.
At the end of the day I got 62 prospects. Yeah, that's all. It's not very much for a cold emailing campaign, to say the least. So, I decided to start cold calling them. Will start this week. But before doing that I think I will need a clear script for myself with the main opening, selling and value points.

Social profiles:
Starting easy. Opened my nice looking social profiles (FB, Insta, X, YT) with main contact information. I didn't open a LinkedIn profile. In fact, I don't actively use it myself, so I don't know if there will be any real benefits. I'll leave it for later. Will not do any active outreach for now, just one simple post per week for a month.

Btw, thinking on time management issues here. It takes too long to filter out the right prospects just to call. Need some automation here. But I am not Google and I don't know how to evaluate the quality of the website just by scraping it. Maybe you have some thoughts or advice on this thing?

This Week's Plan:
  • Work on a studio website: add a few new pages with quality content.
  • Write the script for cold calling.
  • Start a cold calling campaign.
 
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